The 3 primary ways of running an operation in the background in Android is using Threads, Handlers and Services. Though Threads and Handlers are primitive and involve boilerplate code, a more sophisticated way to manage background processing such as loading of images, performing complex computations, downloading Network data is with the help of an AsyncTask, This course covers the following items

Processes in android, their architecture, operation
Threads in android and why you can't use them
Handlers and how they are superior to threads
AsyncTask and how its clean and modular
Handling AsyncTask lifecycle based on activity or fragment destruction
XML Parsing APIs
DOM API and a BlogReader app based on this API